Prominent in the field of monopropellants in hydrazine, a highly toxic material, for which a replacement is being sought. Hydrazine's largest inherent drawback, is its considerable vapor pressure at ambient temperature of approximately 12-14 torr, which leads to a high vapor toxicity. This results in high handling and transfer costs in its use in satellite control devices. A current branch of research of the USAF, is the synthesis and use of new low melting energetic salts either alone or as mixtures with other well-known energetic materials, as new monopropellant materials. These salts offer several inherent advantages over materials such as hydrazine and high concentration hydrogen peroxide, including negligible vapor pressure and significantly improved densities. These properties should make these new materials very appealing to space missions for both government and private interests.
The search for new energetic materials having applications as monopropellant ingredients and/or new fuels is an ongoing research endeavor. Much effort has been applied to find new low melting salts having many inherent advantages over neutral materials such as hydrazine. These advantages include negligible vapor pressure at working conditions as well as much improved densities, usually on the order of 50% or greater. These advantages become apparent in the handling, storage, and lifetime of the device employing the propellant material.
Ionic liquids are known and discussed in two recent patent applications, U.S. Patent Application Publication #2002/0015883 entitled “Ionic liquids” by Hilarius et al, dated Feb. 7, 2002 and Schmidt et al, U.S. Patent Application Publication #2002/0015884 entitled “Ionic liquids II”, dated Feb. 7, 2002. However, none of these references have the newly claimed ionic liquid salts of the present invention as disclosed below nor do they make claims for new energetic materials or new fuels for their systems.
Accordingly, there is need and market for energetic materials of minimized vapor toxicity that overcome the above prior art shortcomings.
There has now been discovered energetic compositions of low vapor toxicity with enhanced stability and performance and method for making same.